Woman in a Blue Robe

The poems in Woman in a Blue Robe consist of work written by Yoko Danno in the period 2002–2016. They range from short epigrammatic poems – sharply observed yet flavored with surrealism – to long pieces that mingle prose and poetry, dream and autobiography, fact and fiction, elegy and celebration, together with Buddhist insight and reference to Japanese historical figures and traditional culture. Among these longer pieces are evocative accounts of the great Kobe earthquake of 1995 and of the reconstruction of the author’s house in its aftermath.